tinywm, a tiny window manager

TinyWM is a tiny window manager that I created as an exercise in minimalism. It is also maybe helpful in learning some of the very basics of creating a window manager. It is only around 50 lines of C. There is also a Python version using python-xlib.

It’s kind of like a multiplexed graphical curses, that can also display bitmaps but not directly write to the display. It was lighter weight than X11 and was popular on Unix machines up into the very early 90’s when it machines became fast enough and had enough ram that X11 was better.

People call X11 crufty, but having written applications that use Win32, X11, and Cocoa without any wrapping, for both software framebuffer applications and OpenGL, I consistently find X11 to be the easiest to use and have the simplest client code.

People call X11 crufty, but having written applications that use Win32, X11, and Cocoa without any wrapping, for both software framebuffer applications and OpenGL, I consistently find X11 to be the easiest to use and have the simplest client code.

Agreed. I haven’t written for Cocoa, but the bare Win32 API does suffer quite a bit from the decision to provide a familiar upgrade path for Win16 developers.

(Most of the design oddities in Win32 can be traced back to OS-side hacks or application-side hack enablement that Win16 did to squeeze good performance out of the limited RAM and CPU resources available in desktop PCs of the period.)